It is Official: Muslims Reinterpret the
Quran!

Sheikh Youssef Alqardawi is probably the most famous Muslim scholar
in the Arab world. He is one of the most influential and highest
ranking Islamic scholars and sits on many Islamic committees. He is
a rich celebrity and has a reputation of being a moderate Muslim
scholar who promotes moderate and science-friendly Islam. His
reputation is not blemished by his support to Hamas and other
radical Islamic organizations and the suicide bombing that kills
civilians and children. As would be expected, Alqardawi is a top
ranking member of the Muslim brotherhood.

[The Arabs
believe that Sheikh Alqardawi is a devout Muslim, who follows the
example of his prophet. This devotion was put to practice when the
old man, over eighty years now, got married to an Algerian girl
named Asma, when she was only seventeen years old, and reportedly
younger than his granddaughter. Unlike Mohammed, our Sheikh was not
endowed with the sexual power of forty men, so he had to rely on
that blue pill made by the infidels and much consumed by the Arab
Sheikhs. Only Allah knows what happened between our Sheikh and his
young wife, because recently they had a divorce. Of course, a Sheikh
in his position doesn’t speak about his private life, but these are
the news that has been circulating about him in the Middle East.]

Alqardawi is an Egyptian who lives in Qatar and appears on Al
Jazeera’s weekly programme ‘Sharia
and Life’, where he discusses issues related to Islam and
answers some of the questions put to him, through phone calls, by
his audience. On his latest appearance on Aljazeera on 22 February
2009, he rejected the evolution theory, because the Quran says
otherwise, which is the standard Islamic answer. He reassured his
audience that Muslims do not need to worry about the evolution
theory as long as it remains a theory, only if it becomes a
recognized scientific fact that the Muslim scholars would
reinterpret the relevant verses in the Quran to bring them in line
with proven scientific facts. “This is not unprecedented in
Islam” admitted Alqardawi as he explained how early interpretations
of the Quran referred to Earth as flat, but when a globe Earth
became a scientific fact, Muslim scholars reinterpreted the verses
by changing their meanings! In fact, the programme host referred to
some existing reinterpretations made by Muslims, who claim that the
Quran agrees with science, which Alqardawi neither ruled out nor
endorsed. His position was: it is too early for that, we are still
safe!

Reinterpretation means changing the meaning of the verses
completely; the same verses that currently mean the evolution theory
is wrong would mean, after reinterpretation, that it is correct! The
next step for Muslims is to claim the Quran told us about the
evolution thirteen hundreds years before Darwin—another
Quranic miracle!

What a Quran and what a religion! What is the point in claiming
the Quran is the unchanged word of Allah, if mortal humans can
change the meaning of that word as they please? And they claim Islam
is divine! What is a manmade religion if Islam is not?

Of course, Alqardawi is not with us to answer this question, but
his answer would be that they only change the meaning of verses on
scientific issues, not on religious issues. Muslim scholars know
that Islam has been selling well recently, to both Muslims and
potential converts, because of the claim that the Quran contains
scientific miracles. In a ‘scientific climate’ like that, it would
be inappropriate to discover that Islam contradicts science on many
issues.

Alqardawi’s outrageous answer did not look that way to his Muslim
audience; on the contrary they accepted it as a logical response.
This is hardly surprising since Muslims have been practicing the
principle of reinterpretation whenever they find an error in the
Quran. Alqardawi’s answer and Muslims’ pliant response to it confirm
what we have been saying about Muslims’ defence of the Quran. They
bury their heads in the sand to avoid looking at the painful
conclusion that the Quran is faulty. They shamelessly reinterpret
the Quran by twisting the language and changing the meanings of the
words or even introducing completely new meanings. From the Muslims’
point of view, the only thing that cannot be changed is their
assumption that ‘the Quran is correct even when it is wrong’.

Alqardawi’s answer reminded me with a similar answer I heard from
a Muslim ‘intellectual’ many years ago. That Muslim claimed that
there is scientific evidence that honey helps to cure most diseases,
which supports a Quranic claim [Q 16:69], made fourteen hundreds
years ago. I asked that ‘intellectual’ what would be his position if
science proves that honey has no healing power at all, and whether,
in that hypothetical scenario, he would accept that the Quran is
wrong. “No” he said loudly and clearly, and went on to explain what
he would do: “the Quran is never wrong, but should such a
scenario ever happens, I would consider alternative meaning for the
word ‘shifa’ (which is Arabic for cure)”

This explains why debating Muslims can be a waste of time and
energy, simply because they do not have free minds necessary for
objectivity. They cannot follow a logical protocol in their debates,
because they already committed themselves to that fixed conclusion
that the Quran is correct. It is sad that many Muslims are not even
aware of this level of inanity they have reached for the sake of
defending an erroneous book. When normal people read a book with
errors and contradictions, they simply conclude it is an erroneous
book and no chance for it being divine. But when those people happen
to be Muslims and the book happens to be the Quran, they keep
reinterpreting the text until they imagine there are no errors, and
then they conclude the book is divine!

The following is an example of the Islamic way in understanding
the Quran:

The Quran says in many
verses that the earth is flat; it used all the available Arabic
vocabulary and language expressions to confirm that statement.

If,
hypothetically, scientists discover that the earth is truly flat:
Muslims would say: This discovery is in full agreement with the
Quran, which described it clearly fourteen hundreds years ago.
This is a miracle!

If,
hypothetically, scientists discover that the earth is like a cube:
Muslims would say: All those words used by the Quran to say flat
actually describe the flat surface of the cube. This is a miracle
mentioned in the Quran fourteen hundreds years ago. Muslims can
find a confirmation to this claim in another place in the Quran
[78:33]. The word ‘cube-like’ was actually mentioned in the Quran
to describe the nice firm breasts of those seventy two virgins
waiting for every Muslim in paradise (opposed to the saggy breasts
of Muslims’ earthly wives). Muslims can claim that the expression
‘kawaeba atraba’, meaning firm breasts, was used by the Quran to
refer to the shape of the Earth and has nothing to do with
tempting the Muslim men with some cheap sexual expressions.

As long as the scientists still say that the earth is a
globe, then all those words and expressions used by the
Quran to describe the Earth as flat, have actually been
misunderstood, because Allah meant to say “Earth appears to us
flat”. The word ‘appear’ magically disappeared but we should have
the intelligence to understand what Allah meant.

And so on!

The Circle of Darkness

When Muslims say something about the Quran, by the time they
finish they forget what they said in the beginning. Their argument
goes in circles:

This is how they prove
their claim that ‘the Quran is divine’: The Quran is divine
because it is a perfect and error free book.

And this how they prove
their claim that ‘the Quran contains no errors’: It is illogical
to say the Quran contains errors, because it is divine and
perfect.